John Niedermeyer is a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at <a href="http://buzzfeed.com">BuzzFeed</a>. Previously, he was a digital designer and editor at <a href="http://nytimes.com">The New York Times</a>.

So, my new job involves local­iz­ing and updat­ing Flash demos of prod­ucts by a pop­u­lar soft­ware cor­po­ra­tion. The orig­i­nal eng­lish files were pro­duced by said cor­po­ra­tion, and I’m sur­prised at how tru­ly spot­ty they are.

We were giv­en a spec­i­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment to use as a ref­er­ence, yet the orig­i­nal files rarely match their own spec. So I find myself rebuild­ing the movies, tweak­ing and writ­ing action-script, and debug­ging… more than just swap­ping out a lit­tle Eng­lish for Span­ish.

It’s hard to imag­ine how these things get past their qual­i­ty assur­ance peo­ple– the eng­lish movies are being used with the gen­er­al pub­lic, as we speak. It makes me think that it’s, a) not so hard get­ting a job at huge soft­ware corps, & b) they don’t require you to do good work…

Although, I could be talk­ing about the work of one per­son. I guess that shouldn’t count for too much.